The description of bilingualism

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The description
of bilingualism
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Warm up
BILINGUALISM
True or False?
Learning more than one language confuses a
child and lowers his/her IQ?
A child should learn one language properly
before learning a second one.
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A person cannot
beSubtitle
a realofbilingual
if he learns a
second language late.
Bilinguals have to translate from their weaker to
their stronger language.
Learning two languages may cause cultural
identity problems for a child.

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What is bilingualism?
• A person speaks two languages regardless of their level
ability in either
• Multilingualism: speaking more than 2 languages
(Sometimes people also use term ‘bilingual’ when a person
has more than two languages)
• There are more bilingual people in the world than those
who only speak one language (monolingual)

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Bilingualism is a worldwide phenomenon. Most nations have speakers of more than one
language. Hundreds of millions of people the world over routinely make use of two or three
or four languages in their daily lives. Furthermore, even so-called monolinguals also
routinely switch from one language variety - a regional dialect, the standard language, a
specialized technical register, a formal or informal style, and so on — to another in the
course of their daily interactions.
According to one influential theory (Gumperz, 1971), a multilingual's facility in moving
from one language to another as the occasion demands is but an extension of the
monolinguals capacity to shift registers and styles (p. 3). The study of multilingualism,
therefore, not only focuses on one of the most significant types of language use but also has
the potential to shed light on language behavior in general.

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It is very common that people develop some knowledge and
ability in second language and so become bilingual.
The simplest definition of a bilingual is a person who has some
functional ability in a second language. The first element to
describe the nature of individual`s bilingualism is to identify
each of the languages.
For example:
Distinguish between Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic
Between High German and Swiss German

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The choice of an individual bilingual's repertoire in any one situation is
governed by a variety of different factors:
(1) the geographical area in which a language or dialect predominates,
e.g., a bilingual Chinese speaker can expect to use Cantonese rather than
Hokkien (two Chinese dialects) in certain towns in Malaysia because a
particular town (e.g., Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh) is predominantly Cantonesespeaking;

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A second important feature is the way each language was
acquired.
It is useful to distinguish between mother tongue learning, second
language learning and foreign (additional) language learning. Each
of these suggest different possible kinds of proficiency, the age of
learning, and the time spent using the language. We describe two
bilinguals in this way:
X is a native speaker of Cantonese and learned English in school.
Y grew up speaking Moroccan Arabic, but was educated in
French and has lived in Paris since the age of 15

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Another set of distinctions is that of skill:
Reading, writing, speaking, understanding speech
• It is not uncommon for people to speak one language and read and write
another.
• Many Navajos use their own language in conversation, but read in
English.
• Until the literacy campaigns of recent times, Ethiopians who spoke
Amharic were more likely to read Gi`iz than Amharic. The receptive skills
of reading and understanding the speech are often stronger in a learned
language than the productive skills of speaking and writing.
• Many people obtain reading knowledge of a language at school but cannot
speak it.

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Another set of difference is often evident in the performance of
certain internal functions. Bilinguals usually prefer one language
for functions such as counting, doing arithmetic, dreaming( some
people dream in language, others don`t), cursing, or praying
silently.
Another useful way to describe bilinguals is by describing the
external functions they can perform in each language. These
might be expressed as “can do” statements.
X can read a daily newspaper, can carry on an informal
conversation, can give a lecture.
One special ability is the skill of translation from one language
to the other.

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Another useful approach to describe a bilingual`s language use is by
domains rather than by functions. A domain is an empirically
determined cluster consisting of a location, a set of role-relationships
and a set of topics. Just as this notion was useful for identifying the
use registers, so it is useful for considering bilingualism. For each of
the domains, a bilingual is likely to have a preferred language.

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) domains, such as family, friendship, business transactions,
employment, religion, and education. Domains may be classified
along a range of formality or informality. Certain codes are
typically used in certain domains; e.g., in Malaysia, Standard
Malay is generally used in the more public and formal domains,
whereas Bazaar Malay is used in interactions with the nonMalays in the market place. Similarly, the official languages are
used in the educational domain in Singapore, but Chinese dialects
continue to be used, to a lesser extent now, in family and
friendship domains, especially in interactions with the elderly.
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Example 2
’Anahina is a bilingual Tongan New Zealander living in Auckland. At home
with her family she uses Tongan almost exclusively for a wide range of
topics. She often talks to her grandmother about Tongan customs, for
instance. With her mother she exchanges gossip about Tongan friends and
relatives. Tongan is the language the family uses at
meal-times. They discuss what they have been doing, plan family outings
and share information about Tongan social events. It is only with her older
sisters that she uses some English words when they are talking about
school or doing their homework.

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Example 3
In Paraguay, a small South American country, two languages are used –
Spanish, the language of the colonisers, and Guaraní, the American Indian
indigenous language.
People in Paraguay are proud that they have their own language which
distinguishes them from the rest of South America. Many rural Paraguayans are
monolingual in Guaraní, but those who live in the cities are usually bilingual.
They read Spanish literature, but they gossip in both Spanish and Guaraní.

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Balanced vs. Dominant bilinguals
• Balanced bilingual:
someone whose mastery of
two languages is roughly equivalent.
Semilingual: • someone with
insufficient knowledge of either
language
Dominant bilingual
someone with greater proficiency
in one of his or her languages
and uses it significantly more than
the other language

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Other Types of Bilingualism
Simultaneous - learning several languages simultaneously.
Additive - the second language is acquired without any
detriment to the speaker’s native language.
Sequential - learning a language after already established first
language.
Substractive - the second language is acquired and the speaker’s
native language deteriorates.

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Prestigious – refers to people, who speak two high-status
languages (English, German, French).
Societal bilingualism - some countries are officially bilingual
(France, India).
Multilingualism – knowledge of several languages.

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5 dimensions of bilingualism
• Age of acquisition
• Context of acquisition
• Sequence of acquisition of two languages Individual
characteristics
• Cognitive organisation of two languages
• Societal factors

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Age of acquisition
(Butler, 2013 ; Hamers & Blanc, 2000 ; Hoffmann, 1991 ; Valdes & Figueroa, 1994
in Baker, 2001)
According to Hoffmann, the age the language is acquired can result in
“considerable differences” (p.18). An ‘early bilingual’ may refer to an ‘infant, child
or adolescent bilingual’, and a‘late bilingual’ would be anyone beyond childhood or
an ‘adult bilingual’ who picked up a L2 later on in life. Age specifi cations remain
unclear, but some have defi ned it to be up to three years of age for an ‘infant
bilingual’, and until the age of puberty for a ‘child bilingual’. Infant bilingualit is
also known as ‘simultaneous bilingualism’, where the infant develops two
languages at the same time the infant learns the meaning of language

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Context of acquisition (Hoff mann, 1991 ; Valdes & Figueroa, 1994 in
Baker, 2001)
While Hamers and Blanc (2000) put this in the same category as age of
acquisition, the context of acquisition refers to the way or environment
in which the languages are learnt. A ‘natural bilingual’ or ‘primary
bilingual’ would have learnt two languages in a natural way from
his or her family and environment, and an infant or child bilingual
might fi t into these types.
This is also called ‘ascribed bilingualism’, and ‘simultaneous
acquisition’ also applies here

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Consequence of acquisition (Hoff mann, 1991)
The order of acquisition, as the name suggests, is the order of acquisition
of L1 and L2 at different times, L2 after the L1, and the consequence of
this on the L1. Baker (2001) calls this the “development” (p.3) of the two
languages in a bilingual. ‘Incipient bilingualism’ and ‘ascendant
bilingualism’ both reflect the improvement in the ability of the ‘additive
bilingual’ to use twolanguages after adding the L2, and the opposites are
‘recessive bilingualism’ and ‘subtractive bilingualism’, where the
bilingual is in danger of losing the L1 or getting less competent or
functional in the L1 because of the addition of L2

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Cognitive organization (Hamers & Blanc, 2000 ; Hoff mann,
1991)
Hoffmann calls this the “relationship between sign and meaning,
i.e. the mental organization of the speech of bilinguals” (p.19).
Butler calls this the “organization of linguistic codes and meaning
unit(s)” (p.113). Yet, Hamers and Blanc call this the “form-function
mapping” (p.29).
Weinreich’s (1968) research on linguistic organization concludes
that there are diff erent ways in which a bilingual organizes
semantic content and linguistic signs.

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